one girl's diary of improvisational engineering

Announcing vusb-analyzer 1.1

The Virtual USB Analyzer is a graphical tool for analyzing USB sniffer logs. It can do some basic protocol decoding, and it has a graphical timeline view which helps to visualize the latency and concurrency characteristics of USB traffic.

This release only adds a single feature, but it’s one that many people have probably been waiting for: support for Linux’s built-in usbmon sniffer tool.

With usbmon, tracing all USB traffic on your system is as simple as cat’ing text from a sysfs node to a file. It doesn’t have quite as many features as VMware’s low-level capture logs, but for most users (especially users debugging Linux USB drivers) this should be more than sufficient.

If you aren’t familiar with usbmon, the first thing to read is Documentation/usb/usbmon.txt from your kernel sources. That will tell you the basics, including how to capture raw data from the kernel. There are a few other simple front-ends for making this data more human-readable. If you’re using vusb-analyzer, those tools aren’t required. Just save the raw data to a file with a .mon extension, and hand that to vusb-analyzer.

This feature was a patch contributed by Christoph Zimmermann. Without his contribution, I no doubt would have procrastinated this release for many more years 🙂